KU Community Cluster

The KU Community Cluster utilizes the condo model to bring together hardware purchased from different researchers into a single heterogenous cluster. This allows participating researchers to have dedicated use of their purchased nodes, or they may run larger computing jobs by sharing idle nodes owned by other researchers. The main benefit is access to a much larger cluster than would typically be available to a single research group.

The cluster hardware and software is administered by CRC staff. This removes the need for postdocs or graduate students from maintaining your computing system. CRC staff also assists users with any problems they may have using the cluster and helps new users by conducting training sessions and one on one sessions.

Bi-annual purchases will be done for fall and spring semesters dependent on funding. One time purchases can be facilitated, but volume discounts may not be achieved, increasing the price of the hardware.

At this time, you must be an owner of hardware in the KU Community Cluster or be sponsored by an owner group within the cluster to gain access. There is no free partition of the cluster and we currently do not have a rate charge of core hours.

Limited Purchasing Opportunity

The Office of Research is making a limited number of new high-performance computing (HPC) nodes available for purchase by KU Lawrence/Edwards research teams. Researchers with an immediate need for additional compute capacity are invited to express interest. 

This is a one-time equipment purchase opportunity under the same ownership arrangement as previous HPC node purchases. The nodes will be housed in the Advanced Computing Facility and managed by KU’s Center for Research Computing.

Equipment and Pricing

Dell PowerEdge R7725 CPU Nodes 

  • CPU: 2 × AMD 9655 processors at 2.6 GHz (192 cores total) 
  • Memory: 768 GB DDR5, 6400 MT/s 
  • Storage: 1.92 TB SATA SSD, 6 Gb/s 
  • Network: 100 Gb Ethernet
  • Warranty: 5-year next-business-day warranty 

Purchase Options and Pricing 

Minimum Requirements

To be considered, requests must meet all four requirements: 

  1. Funding: Have active grant funding or awarded funding that will become active before purchase and can be used to pay for computer hardware, subject to funding eligibility review.
  2. Urgent Need: Demonstrate an urgent project need for the HPC infrastructure, meaning traditional procurement methods are not an option.
  3. Purchase readiness: Be able to purchase 50% or 100% of an available node at the corresponding proportion of KU's original purchase cost by Dec. 4, 2026.
  4. Internal Review: All requests will still go through an internal review process for evaluation and allocation.

Availability is limited. Requests will be reviewed to support a fair and consistent allocation of the available resources. Submission of a request does not guarantee allocation. 

How to Express Interest 

Please send any questions and submissions to RTAI@KU.edu by November 13, 2026. 

Include the following in submissions: 

  • Project/Grant funding 
  • A brief explanation of urgent computing need 
  • Indicate 50% or 100% of node needed 

All owner groups will receive 15TB of $WORK storage for free. Any additional space of $WORK can be purchased for $100 per TB per year. Invoices for storage will be sent 1 year after the storage's start date.

CRC will pay for all backend costs including network and infiniband cables and switches. There is no annual fee associated with the price of the node.

Email crchelp@ku.edu to receive prices for interested SCU options.

Ownership

Upon arrival of the nodes, nodes of the same kind will be assigned at random to buyers of those nodes.

Duration of Ownership

All the owner-based systems, which comes with each SCU, is covered with a five year warranty.  This guarantees that owners will have access to the number of computer cores under this agreement for at least the five year duration of the warranty.

If a compute node breaks during the five year warranty period it will be replaced according to the terms of the hardware warranty (next business day for compute nodes).  At the end of the five year warranty period you will be responsible for any hardware failures that the node may incur. If you don't wish to pay for the repair of the node, it will be taken offline and removed from the cluster.

After the five years of warranty has expired the node will be kept in the cluster as long as space, power, and cooling are available. If space, power, or cooling is needed the oldest nodes in the cluster will be removed with notification sent to the owner.

You may remove your node from the cluster at any time. It will need to be removed from the Advanced Computing Facility. The nodes being purchased are part of a chassis which houses four (4) nodes. If you do wish to take possession of the node you will only receive the node and will need to purchase additional equipment to use it.